A glowing Rotten Tomatoes score, a pile of awards, and endless praise from critics still can’t guarantee that a movie will work for everyone. Sometimes the performances fall flat, the story feels painfully predictable, or viewers simply spend two hours wondering what everyone else apparently saw that they didn’t. And few things are more confusing than finishing a celebrated movie, checking its reviews, and discovering that critics seemingly watched an entirely different film. When people shared the acclaimed movies they just couldn’t understand the love for, everything from Best Picture winners to animated blockbusters caught some heat. Here are 15 highly acclaimed movies people just can’t get behind.
The post 15 People Share the Highly Acclaimed Movies They Just Can’t Get Behind appeared first on Den of Geek.
Martin Scorsese has been making movies since 1967. His filmography currently sits at 26 features, 16 documentaries, and numerous short films. He’s a tireless advocate for film, supporting numerous preservation efforts and sponsoring the world cinema project, which brings attention to filmmakers across the globe. And lately he’s become something of a social media darling, thanks to the efforts of his granddaughter, plus pop star Charli XCX.
Yet if you ask the average moviegoer about Martin Scorsese, they’re likely to identify him as just that guy who makes gangster pictures. To a certain degree, it’s a fair assessment. Scorsese did, after all, make Goodfellas, Casino, and The Irishman, some of the greatest mob movies of all time. Heck, we can include The Wolf of Wall Street and Killers of the Flower Moon in that same category since they are flicks about groups of people doing crime. (Which for the purposes of this list, we are!) Still, Scorsese is so much more than just a chronicler of the mob life. One need not look far into his filmography to find movies in every genre, some of them masterpieces like these nine greats.
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Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore (1974)
Even after making three pictures, Scorsese was worried that he was focusing too much on the wiseguys. So when Ellen Burstyn, hot off her Best Actress nomination for The Exorcist, brought to him a Robert Getchell script about a single mom starting out on a new life, Scorsese jumped at the chance to direct. Some of the hallmarks of Scorsese’s style appear in Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore, including a bad man played by frequent collaborator Harvey Keitel. But much of Alice shows off the director’s keen eye for desperate people finding themselves, even if they do so through entirely legal means.
Burstyn plays Alice Hyatt, whose unhappy marriage comes to an end when her husband (Billy Green Bush) dies in a car accident. Together with her son Tommy (Alfred Lutter), Alice moves to her California hometown hoping to ignite a singing career. But when that fails to take off, she takes a job as a lounge singer where she falls for Ben (Keitel), a violent man hiding his marriage from Alice. To escape Ben, Alice goes to Tuscon, Arizona, where she gets a job at a diner filled with colorful characters, and embarks on a romance with David (Kris Kristofferson). Despite the movie’s more warm-hearted ending, Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore has the same clear-eyed seriousness that Scorsese brings to all of his movies, making Alice just as complicated as any made man he’d later bring to the screen.
Taxi Driver (1976)
Between its iconic lines (“You talkin’ to me?”) and its gratuitously violent climax, which famously almost earned the film an X-rating, Taxi Driver is unquestionably a Martin Scorsese movie. Yet for as much as Robert De Niro‘s Travis Bickle, with his mohawk and dark glasses, has implanted himself in popular culture, the depth and loneliness of Taxi Driver has been too often overlooked.
Taxi Driver is decidedly not a gangster movie, because Travis Bickle has no gang. Heck, he doesn’t even have friends or co-workers. Instead he spends his nights driving a cab throughout the city, a job he takes as a response to his insomnia. He makes no connections with the people who come in and out of his car, but rather turns them into objects of his fantasies, whether they be a young sex worker (Jodie Foster), a potential date (Cybill Shepherd), or a deeply bigoted man played by Scorsese himself. Lost in his own head, Bickle sees himself as a brutal avenger, one who may or may not mete out his own form of justice.
The Last Waltz (1978)
Pop music has always been a big part of Scorsese’s filmography, right from the rambunctious opening of his debut feature Who’s That Knocking at My Door?. So it’s no surprise that he would eventually skip the needle drops and go straight to shooting the band themselves. Which is literally what he does with his first concert documentary The Last Waltz, which captures the final performances of legendary rock group The Band.
Music aficionados will be quick to point out that The Last Waltz does a poor job of representing the actual group, as it pushes most members to the side to focus on frontman Robbie Robertson. But for those willing to set aside accuracy and take the movie as it comes, The Last Waltz is as riveting as any of Scorsese’s works. The songs, of course, are incredible, especially when the Staples Singers join the group to deliver their classic “The Weight.” But just as impressive is the way Scorsese and his crew capture the artists, most notably Muddy Waters’ thundering “Mannish Boy,” a number they almost neglected to shoot, captured on a single camera that rocks to the rhythm of the blues master’s beat.
Raging Bull (1980)
Martin Scorsese has remarked more than once that he was pleasantly surprised when he came out on the other side of Raging Bull to discover that he was still breathing. The experience (and the cocaine) had given him reasons to doubt. We’re of course glad he made it through and also relieed he achieved this uncompromising and brutal triumph of cinema. Jake LaMotta is indeed a tough man to love, with the real-life middleweight boxing champion being essayed in all his violence, hostility, and downright cruelty to his wife and a brother who was (at least according to this film) the only person he could trust.
A biopic about a hard man, Raging Bull turns blood and despair into poetry, reinventing the boxing movie for the first time in decades into a one-man ringside ballet defused in rich black and white cinematography (compliments of Michael Chapman) and a towering performance by Robert De Niro as man unable and uninterested in articulating the source of his rage, but who lets it consume him total even when it makes him a champ. The brilliance of the movie is that it then stays with him past those heady and kinetic days in the ring, finding him decades later alone and miserable in a tragedy that the director and star covet like a lover.
The King of Comedy (1982)
It takes most viewers several rewatches of Taxi Driver before they realize that Travis Bickle is, above all, pathetic. Not so with Rupert Pupkin! Here is the lonely antihero that De Niro plays in The King of Comedy. Written by Paul D. Zimmerman, The King of Comedy follows ambitious comedian Pupkin as he embarks on a desperate plot to get attention by kidnapping Jerry Langford, a talk show host played by Jerry Lewis.
Pupkin is no less frightening than Travis Bickle, even if he presents himself as affable and funny. De Niro injects a sense of menace into his character’s smile, whether he’s making appeals to Langford or addressing the studio audience. Yet where Bickle’s exploits largely take place in his head, Pupkin has a studio audience and viewers on television—perhaps several, depending on how one reads the movie’s depiction of reality and fantasy. However, the audiences don’t make Pupkin any more accepted and loved, putting a new spin on the loneliness that affected his predecessor, Travis.
The Last Temptation of Christ (1988)
Scorsese’s movies have been as much about Christianity as they have been about crime and rock and roll. From Mean Streets onward, his characters have sought salvation and wrestled with the fear of damnation, often calling out to God for direction. In that way, the Jesus of The Last Temptation of Christ, played by Willem Dafoe, isn’t that different than any of Scorsese’s other protagonists, even if he’s called to be the son of God.
Written by Taxi Driver scribe Paul Schrader and adapted from the novel by Nikos Kazantzakis, The Last Temptation of Christ depicts a fully human Jesus, someone who wants nothing more than to marry Mary Madgeline (Barbara Hershey) and spend his days working, but who cannot escape the call of God. To some, The Last Temptation of Christ feels blasphemous, as this Jesus can be read as giving into the final temptation, the one that allows him to avoid sacrifice. But those watching closely will see that the devout Scorsese has given us a faithful Jesus, faithful even to death on a cross.
The Age of Innocence (1993)
Scorsese famously called The Age of Innocence, which he and co-screenwriter Jay Cocks adapted from the Edith Wharton novel, his most violent film. At first that claim sounds hyperbolic. After all, no one in this story of romance among the monied elite of 1870s New York pulls a gun or sticks someone’s head in a vice. Yet when one pays attention to the emotional vulnerability on display, and the great risks assumed by those who seek love, only to have it flatly denied, then Scorsese’s assessment rings true.
Daniel Day Lewis plays Newland Archer, a lawyer who hopes to marry May Welland (Winona Ryder). But when Welland’s cousin, the Countess Ellen Olenska (Michelle Pfeiffer), returns to New York after her failed marriage to a Polish nobleman, Archer’s feelings start to shift. The trio must navigate not just their complicated emotions, but also the demands of high society, a veritable tribe, which already have punished Ellen for the crime of her failed marriage. In the end, The Age of Innocence captures a desire that can never be fulfilled and a longing that can’t be articulated, putting its characters through pain greater than any mobster could ever inflict.
The Aviator (2004)
A movie that Leonardo DiCaprio holds in particularly high regard for what it represented in his career, The Aviator was the second of the then young star’s collaborations with the Raging Bull director. We also would maintain it is one of their more underappreciated despite numerous Oscar nominations, and five wins, including Cate Blanchett for playing Hollywood legend Katharine Hepburn. It’s a movie obviously meant to wow the Academy (at least in the eyes of its studio backers at Miramax). But for Scorsese it epitomized one of his great fixations: the obsessive, passionate artist who will annihilate himself and everyone around him to achieve his dreams.
Admittedly, the real Howard Hughes—the eccentric and, eventually, OCD-raddled mogul played by DiCaprio—likely would not have called himself an artist. He was an aviator, a businessman, a movie producer, a self-described patriot, and plenty of other unsavory things too. But in Scorsese’s hands his near ruinous obsession with directing Hell’s Angels, the half-talkie and half-silent World War I aviation epic that almost bankrupted Hughes twice over before the age of 25 (and then turned out to be Hollywood’s first epic of the sound era) encapsulates a life lived like Icarus: an ancient hero who flies too close to the sun. His literal fall and crash above the rooftops of Beverly Hills is likewise pretty spectacular in Scorsese’s hands. More important than the set pieces, however, is a cinephile’s awe at the Golden Age Hollywood through which Hughes in his prime drifted, and his tragic empathy for a guy who basically had it all but through his own neuroses did great things, terrible things, defied authority, and made for himself a prison worthy of Charles Foster Kane.
Silence (2016)
Although undisputedly the auteur of his films, Scorsese has few writing credits to his name. So the fact that he is listed as a screenwriter, once again alongside Cocks, for adapting the 1966 novel by Japanese author Shūsaku Endō means that Silence has particular importance for Scorsese. Silence brings Scorsese once again back to his Christian faith, and once again deals with questions of skepticism. But unlike his previous religious pictures, Silence brings in a level of suffering and violence usually reserved for movies about gangsters and criminals.
Set in 1640, Silence has a Heart of Darkness-style premise in which young Jesuit priests Sebastião Rodrigues (Andrew Garfield) and Francisco Garupe (Adam Driver) are dispatched to Japan to find their mentor Cristóvão Ferreira (Liam Neeson), who has reportedly abandoned the faith in a land now shut off from the West. There they discover the Tokugawa shogunate now ruling Japan has not only cast out the priests but are murdering Catholic Japanese peasants who refuse to renounce their faith by the thousands. Meanwhile our priests find themselves forced to renounce their beliefs on pain of torture. What follows is one of Scorsese’s most unpleasant but breathtaking movies, proving that he understands the capacity for violence, and sacrifice, in anyone, saint and sinner alike.
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